Страница 61 из 95
“Rebeka,” he said, “I’m going to get a car for us.” Rising, he wove his way out of the square of trees, went across the park, and down a bit, where he saw a car park. Traffic drove by. A taxi passed. He thought about hailing it, but cruising cabs were all too often driven by gang members out to mug and rob unsuspecting tourists. Instead, he stood by the side of the parked car. He was about to break in when a police cruiser drifted past. The cops marked him and the cruiser slowed. Bourne turned away. The cruiser stayed put, and he cursed under his breath.
Another taxi turned the corner and came his way. It was free, and he flagged it down. From the corner of his eye, he saw the cruiser pull away and drive on. When the cab pulled to a halt, Bourne told the driver to wait. Retracing his steps, he returned to the grove. As he brought Rebeka across the park to the waiting vehicle, she murmured something again. This time, he put his ear close to her mouth. Her eyes opened, focusing on him with an obvious effort, and forced herself to repeat it. A name.
They reached the waiting taxi. The driver turned, watching Bourne deposit Rebeka in the backseat and climb in after her.
“ ¿Qué pasa con ella?” the driver said.
“ Ponernos alHospital General de Mexico,” Bourne ordered.
“Hey, she’s bleeding all over my seat!”
“She’s been stabbed,” Bourne said, leaning forward. “ ¡Vamos!”
The driver grimaced, put the taxi in gear, and pulled out into traffic. Within three blocks, Bourne knew they were going the wrong way. Hospital General de Mexico was south of here; they were heading north. He was about to say something when the driver began to pull over to where two squat Mayan-looking men were loitering on a corner, smoking furiously.
Lunging forward, Bourne wrapped one arm around the driver’s throat and pulled hard. At the same time, his free hand groped beneath his jacket, found the pistol, and jerked it out of its shoulder holster.
“The hospital,” Bourne said, pressing the muzzle against the side of his head, “or I pull the trigger.”
“And risk the car going out of control?” The driver, still heading for his partners in crime, shook his head. “You won’t.”
Bourne pulled the trigger and the driver’s head exploded in a welter of blood, brains, and bone. The taxi lurched forward, heading directly toward the two men. They recognized the oncoming vehicle, threw down their butts, and got ready to go to work. Then the taxi jumped the curb and, yelling, they scattered.
By this time, Bourne had clambered over the front seat. Shoving the driver out the door, he slid behind the wheel, veered away to just miss a streetlight and several pedestrians before he was able to muscle the car’s trajectory back out onto the street.
He made a spectacular U-turn, ru
He glanced at Rebeka in the rearview mirror, saw her extreme pallor, could not detect even a shallow breath coming from her. She was bathed in blood.
“Rebeka,” he said. And then, more forcefully, “Rebeka!” She did not respond. Her eyes stared upward blankly. He sped on through the increasingly chaotic streets, past modern buildings and squares embedded in the ruins of the ancient past, into the smoky, raw-flesh–colored Mexico City dawn.
Book Three
21
TREADSTONE’S INTERNAL ALARM sounded at precisely 7:43 am.
Anderson, the ranking Treadstone officer, called Dick Richards at 8:13 am, after his staff had been unable to identify the Trojan that had jumped the firewall to attack the on-site servers, much less quarantine and exterminate it.
“Get down to HQ,” Anderson said, “ASAP.”
Richards, who had been sitting on the edge of his bed, literally biting his nails to the quick while he waited for the call, jumped up, splashed water on his face, and, grabbing his raincoat, headed out the door. On the way to work, he allowed himself a self-satisfied smile.
When he arrived fourteen minutes later, the office was in something of a quiet uproar. No one had yet figured out how a Trojan could have invaded the on-site servers, and it was this question, just as much as how much damage it had done, that occupied the discussion around the IT department.
After checking in with the hastily convened team, Richards set himself up at the server terminal and began his “tracking” of the Trojan he had created and set like a time bomb inside the Treadstone intranet. Creating the Trojan had been the fun part, but inserting it had proved far more difficult than even he had imagined, and he cursed himself for not paying more attention to the intricacies of the firewall during the short time he had been at Treadstone.
He had made the mistake of assuming that the Treadstone firewall was built on the same cyber architecture as those at the DoD and the Pentagon, with which he was familiar. Much to his consternation, he had quickly discovered that it was a completely different animal, one whose algorithms were alien to him.
He had spent hours racking his brain, trying to understand the architecture. He couldn’t find a way in until he discovered how the base algorithm functioned. Close to 4 am, he had cracked it. In celebration he rose, took a long-delayed pee, then selected a beer and some sliced ham from the refrigerator. He rolled the slices into cigars, dipping them into hot mustard, ate them one by one, washing them down with the beer. He chewed and swallowed while considering the possible routes he could take to insert the Trojan through the firewall. It had to be done that way, as if an outside agency were responsible.
He washed his hands and returned to his desktop, starting the tricky and delicate process of breaching the Treadstone firewall. The program he had devised was tiny but supremely powerful. Once inside, it mimicked the server, rerouting Treadstone requests for information to a dead end that would quickly bring all intranet traffic to a screeching halt.
Now, as Richards sat typing away at the server terminal, his job was to insert the virus he had prepared while at the same time quarantining the Trojan before eliminating it. This was just as tricky as the original insertion. He had to make it appear as if the virus was triggered out of the Trojan as it was being isolated. Hair-raising enough, but then Sam Anderson pulled up a chair and sat down next to him.
“How’s it going?”
Richards grunted, hoping Peter’s deputy would get bored and leave. Still he sat, staring at the computer language racing across the screen. Stuxnet was so last year compared to the mutated program he had devised: an advanced viral form that incorporated the best parts of the Stuxnet algorithm and grafted it onto an entirely new architecture, known in his circles as Duqu, which, among other neat devices, used both faked and stolen digital certificates to insinuate itself into the boot program, the core of every operating system. From there, it twisted every command.
“Making progress?”
Richards ground his teeth together in frustration and anxiety. He hadn’t counted on being observed. “I’ve identified the Trojan.”
“Now what?”
On the other hand, he thought, Anderson doesn’t know dick about software programs, so what could make him suspicious? “Now I need to quarantine it.”
“Move it, you mean?”
“In a way.” The constant stream of idiotic questions was making it difficult for Richards to concentrate. “Although ‘moving’ in the cyber world is a relative term.”